This week the inaugural John Peel Lecture was broadcast on BBC 6 Music, with Pete Townshend speaking at the Radio Festival in Salford. Introduced by Mark Radcliffe and Stuart Maconie, the series states an aim to channel “the values of boundless curiosity, exploration and celebration of music,” correctly ascribed to John Peel. But when Townshend was introduced, The Who were called “one of Britain’s most successful and iconic bands,” in other words, already that simple task of focusing on ‘music’ was taking a back seat; linguistically subjugated by two un-musical things: popularity and iconography.

Yeah, before Townshend even spoke a word, his half century of work got Florence And The Machined; ‘fiscalated’ to a horrific, Hallowe’en-y extent.

Anyway, almost nothing Townshend said in the lecture made sense to me, after his initial truism of “All creative musicians want is the resources and the facilities to make music.” He openly decided to represent the entire Internet music distribution world solely with iTunes, as if Apple was still the only provider of legal downloads; in other words wrenching his argument pointlessly forwards in time from 2003, when that was briefly true.

Making almost deranged broad-stroke negative assumptions about DIY processes – for example arguing that bloggers are so collectively mean they somehow cannot tell the truth to artists in the way that old major label A&Rs could (ignoring that these two jobs are utterly perpendicular) – Townshend demanded iTunes install an in-house A&R team, start marketing and hyping their prefered artists like major record companies do (did), and asked Apple to donate computers to the 500 ‘best’ artists per year.

Honestly, this is just gibberish. His argument boiled down to the re-emergence of subjective (and money-led) third party quality control, built back into the mix, as was the norm in the bad old systems. Worse, Townshend thinks that iTunes should be licensing their ‘best’ music to physical distributors to make CDs, or books, or whatever packages they like. He spoke as though that isn’t already happening, in the hands of independent artists, who use iTunes as it should be used – one non exclusive distribution tool for their digital work. He spoke as if taking on the physical nonsense would somehow be a useful service for artists, rather than – in fact – a(nother) rights-stealing restriction on what we can do better for ourselves.

Townshend’s vision for imposing these old (dying) processes on the new world is a desperately regressive step towards giving even more control to a company he’d criticised only moments before for being exploitative. Anyone with experience in both old and new music worlds should see clearly, what Townshend called ‘creative nurturance’ has always been one of the most singularly evil aspects of the ‘old’ music (and entertainment) industries. There almost never was duty of care. There almost never was artistic development. It was always fundamentally and aggressively commercial development; workload pressure edging toward the impossible; often (not just sometimes but often) bullying and at worst the deliberate creation of life-threatening co-dependencies to increase control over artists’ lives.

I’m not being conspiratorial, that’s what happened, across every genre, forever. Squint honestly through smoke and mirrors and rose-tinted myth; the entire history of popular music is brimful of despicable acts of control over and abuse of talent by the exact types Townshend wishes to resurrect, from Colonel Tom Parker onwards.

Townshend knows this too. He knows that the ‘nurturing’ he described in the lecture is a fiction.

Apart from that unpleasant stuff, basically everything else he suggested is already in place on the Internet, independently of iTunes. And funnily enough, service providers that get nearest his vision are the most exploitative – the sneaky gits out there charging for gig promotion, or tricking bands into paying to be on ‘career-launching’ compilations, organising rip-off pay to play ‘battle of the bands’ contests, or building whole networks just to flog artists their clunky, unnecessary electronic press kits. Meanwhile the good online tools for artists are plethora and you pick and choose. If Apple turned around tomorrow and offered exactly what Townshend asked for, it wouldn’t add a single USP beyond what’s competing online already, built by small, highly competitive companies fighting to build their own roster or corner a bit of the market.

I’m not over-romanticising: I made a similar but more nuanced point in my own talk (much, much less heard!) at Brighton Digital Festival last month; I know we don’t live in the DIY paradise some musicians imagine. The majors are replaced by less pro-active, often automated systems that still take a cut and still get rich off our music. From Bandcamp to PledgeMusic to Facebook, there is always a profit motive behind the user-friendly ‘sharing’ vibe. But the solution isn’t to run backwards into the arms of the kinds of malignant fools who used to own the show unhindered.

The solution is to pick the right ones, use them in the right way and keep your eyes peeled for developments.

John Peel wasn’t a record business sales rep, he played music on the radio. Although obviously he had to survive a changing diaspora and therefore play the game, John Peel was remarkably disinterested in the ‘business’. He broke so many great artists without caring whether they’d go on to be superstars: he just played the songs he liked.

This was the real pity about the first John Peel Lecture – as with far too many officiated conversations about the arts today – it was all business, no creativity. Despite disagreeing so strongly with him and also being disappointed by his under-prepared sub TedX delivery, I still think Townshend was a good choice to speak under the banner.

They should pick outstanding individuals, not aim for constancy of content – and Pete Townshend was an uncomfortable, unique visionary in his day. But it would’ve been fabulous if he’d chosen an aspect of his music-making, rather than a discussion about the processes of commerce, to talk to us about. Anything from tinnitus to songwriting to guitar effects pedals would’ve been better.

So in future, hopefully the music industry lecture series in John Peel’s name will be about music, rather than industry.